This model minister was dear to every heart, for it was he who had blessed them when they first saw the light of day, had baptized them when first his kindly teachings had awakened their aspirations to walk in the straight and narrow way.  It was he who married them when they found each the alter ego, to whom they could say: 

  “Thou art all to me love for which my heart did pine
  A green isle in the sea love, a fountain and a shrine.”

It was he who had lifted their souls on the breath of prayer, when their loved ones had “fallen asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep, from which none ever wake to weep.”

They loved him though they gave him from their scanty earnings but $400 a year, and half the fish he could catch, yet they liberally supplied his larder with their sweetest butter, freshest eggs, and the choicest cuts from their flocks.  When a city minister once said to him:  “You have a poor salary, brother,” he at once replied:  “Ah, but I give them mighty poor preaching, you know.”

Grand old man, he followed closely in the footsteps of his Master, and accomplished much more good than many famous ones who wander far from the precepts of the lowly Nazarene, and deliver featureless sermons to unresponsive, gaily-attired Dives under the arches of great cathedrals.

But the trail of the serpent is everywhere found, even in this sequestered spot.  There was, in the outskirts of the town, the inevitable rumshop, fed, it was said, by an illicit still in the woods, and there as usual Satan held high carnival among families dead in trespasses and sins.  There we assayed to hold temperance prayer-meetings, but they loved darkness rather than light, and we cast our pearls before swine, who turned and rent us.

On one occasion we tried to hold services in the little old deserted schoolhouse, and found it, much to our surprise, packed with the inhabitants of Sodom; a more villainous looking crowd I never saw not even in darkest New York.  Beetle-browed, mop-haired men, whose faces, if tapped, would apparently give forth as much fire-water as a rum barrel.

For a short time they listened to the singing:  but when the aged minister attempted with earnest words to inspire to a better life it seemed as if all the fiends from heaven that fell, had pealed the banner cry of hell.  Then a decayed cabbage struck him full in the face, ancient and unfragrant turnips and potatoes filled the air, our little band crowded around to shield him, but unmercifully assailed, we were obliged to wield the chairs vigorously over their heads to fight our way to the door.

One of our number left to guard the sleigh, luckily had it ready, in we jumped and drove for our lives, pursued by invectives too horrible to mention.

This attack was inspired by the keeper of the den of iniquity as he feared he would be deprived of his evil gains, and that night he rewarded them with unlimited free drinks until they drowned their consciences in a prolonged debauch.